Chapter 1

No Shoes at the Doorstep

It was just after 4.00 p.m. on Wednesday, 19 August 1992 when Christine Simpson rang home to Bargo on the south coast of New South Wales to make sure the kids had arrived home safely. She had told her 15-year-old son, Zac, to meet his nine-year-old sister, Ebony, as she got off the school bus. It wasn’t that Christine intended to be late, it was just that she and her husband, Peter, had had to go to nearby Wollongong to pay some bills and she thought they might be delayed. As expected, they had had to wait in a long queue at the Roads and Traffic Authority and were running about ten minutes late.

Usually, Zac got off the bus 100 metres from Ebony’s bus stop shortly before she did. That day, however, his bus took a slightly different route and he arrived after her. When Zac told his mother that his bus had been late and that Ebony was nowhere to be found, Christine’s heart missed a beat. She told him, ‘Go back to the bus stop on your bike immediately and wait for me. We’re coming now.’

Ebony was a reliable child. She never went anywhere without letting someone know where she was going. But she had been fighting Christine to walk home from the bus on her own lately. Peter and the boys had argued that she was almost ten and old enough to walk the 400 metres from the bus stop to her front door. After all, she was the only child on the bus who was met by a parent. Christine wasn’t so sure. She felt that she should still pick up Ebony. The few times she’d allowed her daughter to walk home alone, she had followed and watched without being seen. Now Ebony was gone. Someone had taken her.

‘Oh God, something’s happened to Ebony,’ said Christine turning to Peter. ‘Someone’s got her.’

‘No. She’s probably with one of her friends,’ he replied.

‘Somebody’s got her!’ Christine repeated.

‘No. It won’t be like that, Teen,’ he reassured her, using her pet name. ‘It’s going to be all right.’

Christine looked out of the car window. Deep down she just knew something had happened. Something was wrong.

Despite feeling confident that Ebony was okay, Peter drove quickly along the freeway towards home. He could hear how panicked Christine was, and although he didn’t understand how she could be so definite about something being wrong, he wanted to appease her.

As Peter finally drove the Landcruiser down the driveway, Christine’s eyes scanned the verandah for Ebony’s shoes. They weren’t there.

‘Call the police,’ she instructed Peter as she raced from the car. ‘I’m going to find her.’ Peter went inside straight away and called the local police station to report his daughter missing. It was a frustrating call as no one seemed to understand the mounting urgency he was feeling. ‘They didn’t seem to be taking this as seriously as I would have liked them to,’ Peter said later. Regardless, the police agreed to send someone out to him.

By the time the police arrived, Peter had made a lot of telephone calls. First, there had been Ebony’s friends, friends of her friends and any family he could think of that was associated with her or her school. ‘I was hopeful that she may have gone to a friend’s house or someone else’s mother might have picked her up,’ Peter says. He’d reasoned that if another mother had given her a lift and stopped somewhere on the way to their house, they could have been caught up. He’d been sure there was a reason she hadn’t come home. What had concerned him was that Ebony hadn’t called. He’d rung the bus depot and questioned the driver about whether he had picked up Ebony, where he had dropped her off, and whether he knew who she was.

There had also been the school. Ebony’s principal and the teachers at her school hadn’t seen her leave with anyone else. Peter had sat at his desk dialling person after person. Each fruitless phone call had made his stomach tighten a little more and had heightened the urgency of finding someone with an answer. It was the same urgency anyone who has lost a child in a supermarket feels: adrenaline takes over and everything becomes a blur in the effort to find that one familiar face – your child’s.

‘I basically was driving myself crazy … it is just the worst possible feeling when your child is not where they are supposed to be,’ says Peter.

Ebony had beautiful features. She turned heads. There was something striking about her combination of ash blonde hair, almost blue eyes and wide smile. She had a darker version of her mother’s eyes, the curiosity of a child and a gentleness that endeared her to many she met. Peter had often taken her with him on his deliveries when he had had his landscaping supply business and during those months she had made many friends.

The short period of time it had taken the first police to arrive had seemed interminable. Now they were asking Peter the same questions repeatedly.

‘Have there been any arguments in the house?’ the police officer asked again. ‘Is it possible Ebony didn’t want to come home?’

Peter shook his head. Other kids did these sort of things, but not Ebony, not without calling. ‘I thought, my God, am I going mad here? How many times do I have to tell these people the same thing?’ he recalls.

‘Would she have gone to a friend’s house?’ the police officer continued.

‘No. I told you I rang them all before you arrived. No one has seen her since she got off the bus.’

In the meantime, Christine ran to the bus stop and back, searching for Ebony. There was no sign of her. ‘I had thought if she had been kidnapped she would have dropped her bag or something,’ says Christine. ‘… Maybe somebody went to grab her and she ran away and she was frightened and she was hiding somewhere.’ That was if she had broken free.

Then Christine sprinted across to the farmhouse next door, calling Ebony’s name. It was a weekender, so no one was there. Crawling beneath the house, Christine was aware of how dark and damp it was. Her little girl would have to have been pretty scared, to have climbed under here. There were spiders everywhere. Brushing a web away she hauled herself out.

‘Ebony! Ebony!’ she yelled heading for the barn. ‘It’s Mummy! Ebony! It’s all right, it’s me!’ There was no sign of Ebony in the hay or around the barn. Christine noticed the Otto bin outside the barn. She walked over and grabbed the lid. Closing her eyes she opened it, but there was nothing inside. She straightened up. There was still 40 acres of property left to search.

It wasn’t until the fingerprint police arrived that Peter came to the terrible realisation that he was a suspect. One of the police officers asked to look around Ebony’s room and Peter showed him which one was hers. Working as if on automatic pilot, he placed out the items that the police officer had requested without questioning why. Now they were taking fingerprints from everything, his fingerprints. He knew he was a suspect, but he couldn’t understand why.

Meanwhile, Christine stood waist deep in creek water. Up the road at her house was a beehive of activity. Her mind, now in freeze frame, went back over all of the places where she had searched: under her neighbour’s house, in their shed, around the school, beneath the portables, the dams, the tracks, the bus stop, the bins. She knew she had to keep searching.

It was about 6.00 p.m. when Peter decided to ring his sisters-in-law, Margaret and Alison, to tell them that Ebony was missing. The story of her disappearance was about to be shown on the news and he didn’t want them to hear about it from the television first. Christine was incredibly close to her two sisters, especially the elder, Margaret, who had been staying with their other sister, Alison, in Penrith. When the sisters received Peter’s call, they climbed together into the car, filled up the tank with petrol and started on the drive to Bargo.

Ebony’s 73-year-old grandmother lived in a granny flat on Alison’s property. Margaret and Alison had debated whether or not to worry her with Ebony’s disappearance and had decided that, as Alison’s husband was home, they wouldn’t. Maybe the whole thing would turn out to be a false alarm, they reasoned. Maybe their niece was at a friend’s house. They had just clambered into the car and closed the doors when their mother, Winifred Aflick, appeared.

‘Where are you two off to?’ Winifred asked. ‘It’s dark.’ Crying, they were forced to tell her where they were going. Margaret watched her mother from the car window as they pulled away. She was aware that they had left her not knowing whether her granddaughter was alive or dead.

In Bargo, more and more police had begun to arrive at the Simpson house along with members of the State Emergency Service (SES), the fire brigade, the rural fire service, the media and people wanting to help search. Peter had provided the dog squad with some of Ebony’s clothing, and now he was moving his truck to one of his paddocks as a search helicopter needed to land. When asked for a suitable landing area, Peter had suggested his paddock and he parked one of his vehicles to the side of it, with its lights on, to illuminate the area.

As he got out of his truck, Peter peered into the darkness. He was all too aware that his wife and two sons were somewhere out there searching for his little girl. Zac and his 14-year-old brother, Tasman, had left to search around the same time as their mother. The boys were on their motorbikes. Peter wanted to be with them. He wanted to be searching, not answering the same mindless questions. Not feeling accused. He returned to the house. A trace was being set up on his family’s telephone line in the event that a ransom call would be made.

It was approximately 8.30 p.m. when a local teenager arrived at the Simpson house. He had heard the helicopter and driven there to see what was happening. A number of people had gathered on the edge of the road just outside the property. The teenager approached the group and asked one of the women, ‘Who’s missing?’

‘Ebony,’ she replied.

‘Do you know her last name?’ he asked.

‘Simpson,’ she answered. He explained to the woman that he had seen the little girl that afternoon. She had been walking home and there had been a car stopped not far from her. The woman directed him to a police officer to whom the teenager recounted his story.

He and his younger brother had been driving home in their car when they saw Ebony. In the middle of his Higher School Certificate exams, he had been doing some chores for his parents in nearby Tahmour, before picking up his brother. Both boys knew Ebony and her family as they lived nearby. Ebony had been walking in the gutter between the road and the footpath when they saw her. As the car went past, she had looked at the boys for a moment but neither side had waved. The brothers’ car had rounded the corner and the teenagers had noticed a yellow car. It was dirty and there were black exhaust stains on the rear bumper and over the tail light. Both the boot and bonnet had been opened. A man had been leaning into the engine bay. He had had an orangey-red oilcan in his hand. The teenager had looked back through his rear-view mirror, noting that the car was a Mazda 808. He knew a lot about cars, especially Mazdas, as his older brother owned one.

The police officer listened to the boy’s story, and then sent him and another police officer to the spot where he had seen the car. They searched the area with torches but found nothing.

As Margaret and Alison drove into Arina Road at the end of a two-hour drive from Penrith, they were amazed that the whole place was swarming with people and lights. Bargo is a small town 100 kilometres south-west of Sydney, surrounded by farmlands and bush. Normally tranquil, there were now helicopters, police cars and SES people everywhere.

Peter’s brother, Warren, also raced from Sydney to Bargo after hearing an evening news report on his car radio about a nine-year-old girl who had gone missing from the town. He didn’t know it was Ebony but had an uncanny feeling it was. After arriving at the Simpson house, he began to help answer the phone. Peter was glad of the help. It seemed to ring constantly.

Peter now felt frantic. All he wanted to do was get out and search for Ebony, but the police wouldn’t let him. Their questions were endless, and although he was aware they needed answers as quickly as possible in order to help, they were incredibly repetitive. It was the same questions again and again. The only difference was the rank of the police. As time went on the rank increased. Peter looked at Christine, who had slipped back into the house. She was distraught. He decided to ask the officers again if he could leave to join the search. At 10.00 p.m. the police finally said he could go.

Peter and Christine climbed into the Landcruiser and drove towards the front gate. Outside the property looked like a battle zone. There were cars, lights and people everywhere. As he took in the army of people and media, Peter was thankful they had kept the gate closed. He turned the car out onto the road and headed for the school. Despite having been told that the school had been thoroughly searched, he and Christine decided to search it again. For the next hour, they climbed under the portables and looked in all the bins together.

Down the road from the Simpson house, Nellie Abela grabbed her spotlight and headed into her backyard. Her dogs had just begun to bark again. She had already made a number of searches of her property since she had heard that her nine-year-old neighbour was missing. The last search of the kennels had also been in response to their barking. The police helicopter had stirred them up then. This time it was a police officer with a trained dog.

Nellie Abela had seen Ebony earlier that day. She had been looking out her kitchen window when she noticed the little girl slow down to peer into the yard. The Abela family kept sheep and their lambs had just been born. All the kids loved to see them. Putting on her boots she had headed outside, but by the time she had reached the front yard Ebony had gone. Nellie talked to the police officer for a while, and then sat by the telephone, waiting to hear news about the missing child.

It was in the early hours of the morning when Christine and Peter returned home. There was still no news of their daughter. Peter fell to his knees on the floor beside his and Christine’s bed and began to pray to a God he’d long since stopped praying to.

‘Please,’ he begged, ‘don’t let this happen. Let her be okay.’ At that moment he knew he would do anything, give anything, for Ebony to be found safe.